Category: Depression

The deficiency is linked to depression and poorer brain function, lower verbal fluency and even dementia.

Vitamin D deficiency is linked to depressive symptoms and more negative thoughts, research finds.

Vitamin D deficiency is also linked to cognitive impairments in young people.

Foods that have high levels of vitamin D include oily fish and eggs but most people get their vitamin D from the action of sunlight on the skin.

That is why levels are typically lower in the body through the winter months in more Northern climes.

The research was carried out on 225 patients being treated for psychotic disorders and 159 well people.

Among people with psychosis, higher levels of negative symptoms and depression were found in those with low vitamin D levels.

Problems with processing speed and verbal fluency were also found among young people with low levels of vitamin D.

The findings fit in with previous research that low vitamin D levels are linked to depression.

The vitamin is also thought to play a role in regulating serotonin, a neurotransmitter important for mood.

Vitamin D deficiency has even been linked to dementia.

The study’s authors conclude:

“In a clinical setting, this could support vitamin D as adjuvant therapy in treating co-morbid depressions in psychotic disorders

The associations between low vitamin D levels and increased negative and depressive symptoms, and decreased processing speed and verbal fluency are good arguments for planning large scale randomised controlled studies in target populations, in order to reach conclusions about vitamin D’s potential beneficial effect in psychotic disorders.”

The study was published in the journal Schizophrenia Research (Nerhus et al., 2016).

This tip may help people who are feeling depressed.

Clinically depressed people can find it hard to tell the difference between their own negative emotions, like anger, guilt and frustration.

This could be part of the reason that depression is so hard to deal with.

It may be helpful for people experiencing depression to be more specific about which negative emotion they are feeling, the research also suggests.

The study’s first author, Dr Emre Demiralp, explains:

“It is difficult to improve your life without knowing whether you are sad or angry about some aspect of it.

For example, imagine not having a gauge independently indicating the gasoline level of your car.

It would be challenging to know when to stop for gas.

We wanted to investigate whether people with clinical depression had emotional gauges that were informative and whether they experienced emotions with the same level of specificity and differentiation as healthy people.”

Participants in the study — half of whom were experiencing clinical depression — were asked to report their emotions at random intervals over a period of a week.

Each time they reported how they felt across 11 different emotions, 7 negative and 4 positive:

• sad,
• anxious,
• angry,
• frustrated,
• ashamed,
• disgusted,
• guilty,
• happy,
• excited,
• alert,
• and active.

The results, published in the journal Psychological Science, showed that people who were depressed found it difficult to distinguish between negative emotions (Demiralp et al., 2012).

In contrast, non-depressed people were clearer which negative emotions they were experiencing.

For the positive emotions, however, both the depressed and non-depressed participants could distinguish them equally well.

Dr. Demiralp said:

“Our results suggest that being specific about your negative emotions might be good for you.

It might be best to avoid thinking that you are feeling generally bad or unpleasant.

Be specific.

Is it anger, shame, guilt or some other emotion?

This can help you circumvent it and improve your life.

It is one of our overarching goals to investigate approaches for facilitating this kind of emotional intelligence at a large scale in the population.”

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